Nadia's Quilt

Recently, Joe's cousin Andy and his wife Rika had a baby girl. I felt that the new arrival, Nadia Kiko, was clearly in need of a quilt and began working on a pinwheel patchwork design.

I had many of the fabrics in my stash. The fruit print is part of the Alexander Henry picnic collection. I bought a decent amount of that print, as well as the blue dots, at Purl in NYC to make my daughter a sundress. I way overbought, however, and had plenty left to make this quilt. In fact, I still have enough for another few pinwheels!

The red dot and blue pattern fabrics came from the quilting cottons section at Jo-ann. Quality wise, they were ok, but the red dot was a little thin. It has almost a challis-y rayon-y feel to it. The red zig zag fabric came from a local quilting store. The blue/red rickrack for the back came from Hancocks, and was such a perfect fit for the front that I overlooked the fact that it is a poly/cotton blend.

The biggest challenge for me was the actual construction of the pinwheels. My half-square triangles were never quite square, and therefore, I had to do a lot of squaring up. It was also hard to not cut off the pinwheel points when piecing the pinwheels together. Another issue that I had was that I sewed some of the pinwheels backwards, so they were "spinning" the wrong way. I was more careful after having to rip out four blocks.

I made a bunch of the pinwheels before deciding on a layout, and actually had made some green pinwheels as well. I tried a few different settings, but I think laying out the pinwheels on point gave the quilt a modern feel. I love the way the pieced border came out, but I did have some problems with the border flaring out slightly.

I used two layers of cotton quilt batting and basted the quilt using a wide zig zag stitch. I think that the thread basting worked better for me than safety pins, but I had some trouble with the basting threads getting caught in the quilting. I quilted in the ditch for the pinwheels, then did some variously sized squares in the white blocks. I still have some puckering problems in the back, but this looked a lot better than my last attempt. I may try spray basting glue next time.

As you can see, I also made a bag to package the quilt in. it's basically a pillowcase made from chocolate brown corduroy, with two appliqued birds on the front. I also made a quilt label. I just printed with an ink-jet right on the fabric, I hope it is wash-proof!